Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (35 page)

All that I knew about my tenants Tom Merritt told me. I never saw any of the Rustum Dadh family from first to last. I had, in fact, completely forgotten all about them until I arrived in Chadbourne the following June some time after their departure and learned from Tom the bare facts I have set out here.

On a certain night in July that summer the Rustum Dadhs were farthest from my thoughts. It was nine o’clock, and I was sitting in the living-room reading. My telephone rang insistently. I laid down my book with a sigh at being interrupted. I found Thomas Bradford Merritt, M.D., on the other end of the wire.

‘Come on down here as soon as you can, Gerald,’ said Tom without any preliminaries, and there was a certain unusual urgency in his voice.

‘What’s happened?’ I inquired.

‘It may be – ah – something in your line, so to speak,’ said Doctor Merritt; ‘something – well – out of the ordinary. Bring that Männlicher rifle of yours!’

‘I’ll be right down,’ said I, snapped up the receiver, got the Männlicher out of my case in the hall where it is in with my shotguns, and raced out to the garage. Here, of a certainty, was something quite strange and new for Chadbourne, where the nearest thing to anything like excitement from year’s end to year’s end would be an altercation between a couple of robins over a simultaneously discovered worm! ‘Bring your rifle!’ On the way down to the village I did not try to imagine what could possibly lie behind such a summons – from conservative Tom Merritt. I concentrated upon my driving, down the winding country road from my rugged hilltop into town, speeding on the short stretches, easing around treacherous turns at great speed . . .

I dashed into Tom’s house eight minutes after hanging up the receiver. There was a light I had observed, in the library as well as in the office, and I went straight in there and found Tom sitting on the edge of a stiff chair, plainly waiting for my arrival.

‘Here I am,’ said I, and laid my rifle on the library table. Tom plunged into his story . . .

‘I’m tied up – a confinement case. They’ll be calling me now any minute. Listen to this, Gerald – this is probably a new one on you – what I’ve got to tell you – even in the face of all the queer things you know – your West Indian experiences;
vodu
; all the rest of it; something
I
know, and – have always kept my mouth shut about! That is – if this is what I’m afraid it is. You’ll have to take my word for it. I haven’t lost my mind or anything of the sort – you’ll probably think that if it turns out to be what I think it is – get this, now.

‘Dan Curtiss’s little boy, Truman, disappeared, late this afternoon, about sundown. Truman is five years old, a little fellow. He was last seen by some older kids coming back to town with berries from the Ridge, about suppertime. Little Truman, they said, was “with a lady”, just outside the Old Cemetery.

‘Two lambs and a calf have disappeared within the last week. Traced up there. A bone or two and a wisp of wool or so – the calf’s ears, in different places, but both up there, and part of its tail; found ’em scattered around when they got up there to look.

‘Some are saying “a cattymaount”. Most of ’em say dogs.

‘But – it isn’t dogs, Gerald. “Sheep-killers” tear up their victims on the spot. They don’t drag ’em three miles up a steep hill before they eat ’em. They run in a pack, too. Everybody knows that. Nothing like that has been seen – no pack, no evidences of a pack. Those lost animals have all disappeared singly – more evidence that it isn’t “dogs”. They’ve been taken up and, presumably, eaten, up on top of the Cemetery Ridge. Sheep-killing dogs don’t take calves, either, and there’s that calf to be accounted for. You see – I’ve been thinking it all out, pretty carefully. As for the catamount, well, catamounts don’t, commonly, live – and eat – out in the open. A catamount would drag off a stolen animal far into the deep woods.’

I nodded.

‘I’ve heard something about animals disappearing; only the way I heard it was that it’s been going on for quite a long time, and somewhat more intensively during the past month or so.’

Tom Merritt nodded at that. ‘Right,’ said he. ‘It’s been going on ever since those Persians left, Gerald. All the time they were here – six months it was – they always bought their house supply of meat and poultry alive, “on the hoof”. Presumably they preferred to kill and dress their meat themselves. I don’t know, for a fact, of course. Anyhow, that was one of the peculiarities of the “foreigners up at the Canevin Place”, and it got plenty of comment in the town, as you may well imagine. And – since they left – it hasn’t been only lambs and calves. I know of at least four dogs. Cats, maybe, too! Nobody would keep much account of lost cats in Chadbourne.’

This, somehow, surprised me. I had failed to hear about the dogs and possible cats.

‘Dogs, too, eh?’ I remarked.

Then Tom Merritt got up abruptly, off his stiff chair, and came over and stood close behind me and spoke low and intensively, and very convincingly, directly into my ear.

‘And now – it’s a child, Gerald. That’s too much – for this, or any other decent town. You’ve never lived in Persia. I have. I’m going to tell you in plain words what I think is going on. Try to believe me, Gerald. Literally, I mean. You’ve got to believe me – trust me – to do what
you’ve
got to
do
tonight because
I
can’t
come right now.
It’s going to be an ordeal for you. It would be for anybody. Listen to this, now.

‘This situation only came to me, clearly, just before I called you up, Gerald. I’d been sitting here, after supper, tied up on this Grantham case – waiting for them to call me. It was little Truman Curtiss’s disappearance that brought the thing to a head, of course. The whole town’s buzzing with it, naturally. No such thing has ever happened here before. A child has always been perfectly safe in Chadbourne since they killed off the last Indian a hundred and fifty years ago. I hadn’t seen the connection before. I’ve been worked to death for one thing. I naturally hadn’t been very much steamed up about a few lambs and dogs dropping out of sight.

‘That might mean a camp of tramps somewhere. But – tramps don’t steal five-year-old kids. It isn’t tramps that do kidnapping for ransom.

‘It all fitted together as soon as I really put my mind on it. Those Rustum Dadhs and their unaccountable reticence – the live animals that went up to that house of yours all winter – what I’d heard, and even seen a glimpse of – out there in Kut and Shiraz – that grim-jawed, tight-lipped chauffeur of theirs, with the wife that nobody ever got a glimpse of – finally that story of little Abby Chandler – ’

And the incredible remainder of what Doctor Thomas Merritt had to tell me was said literally in my ear, in a tense whisper, as though the teller were actually reluctant that the walls and chairs and books of that mellow old New England library should overhear the utterly monstrous thing he had to tell . . .

I was shaken when he had finished. I looked long into my lifelong friend Tom Merritt’s honest eyes as he stood before me when he had finished, his two firm, capable hands resting on my two shoulders. There was conviction, certainty, in his look. There was no slightest doubt in my mind but that he believed what he had been telling me. But – could he, or anyone, by any possible chance, be right on the facts? Here, in Chadbourne, of all places on top of the globe!

‘I’ve read about – them – in the
Arabian Nights
,’ I managed to murmur.

Tom Merritt nodded decisively. ‘I’ve seen – two,’ he said, quietly. ‘Get going, Gerald,’ he added; ‘it’s action from now on.’

I stepped over to the table and picked up my rifle.

‘And remember,’ he added, as we walked across the room to the door, ‘what I’ve told you about them. Shoot them down. Shoot to kill – if you see them. Don’t hesitate. Don’t wait. Don’t – er – talk! No hesitation. That’s the rule – in Persia. And remember how to prove it
– remember the marks
! You may have to prove it – to anybody who may be up there still, hunting for poor little Truman Curtiss.’

The office telephone rang.

Doctor Merritt opened the library door and looked out into the wide hallway. Then he shouted in the direction of the kitchen.

‘Answer it, Mehitabel. Tell ’em I’ve left. It’ll be Seymour Grantham, for his wife.’ Then, to me: ‘There are two search-parties up there, Gerald.’

And as we ran down the path from the front door to where our two cars were standing in the road I heard Doctor Merritt’s elderly housekeeper at the telephone explaining in her high, nasal twang of the born Yankee, imparting the information that the doctor was on his way to the agitated Grantham family.

I drove up to the old cemetery on the Ridge even faster than I had come down from my own hill fifteen minutes earlier that evening.

The late July moon, one night away from full, bathed the fragrant hills in her clear, serene light. Half-way up the hill road to the Ridge I passed one search-party returning. I encountered the other coming out of the cemetery gate as I stopped my steaming engine and set my brakes in front of the entrance. The three men of this party, armed with a lantern, a rifle, and two sizable clubs, gathered around me. The youngest, Jed Peters, was the first to speak. It was precisely in the spirit of Chadbourne that this first remark should have no direct reference to the pressing affair motivating all of us. Jed had pointed to my rifle, interest registered plainly in his heavy, honest countenance.

‘Some weepon – thet-thar, I’d reckon, Mr Canevin.’

I have had a long experience with my Chadbourne neighbors.

‘It’s a Männlicher,’ said I, ‘what is called “a weapon of precision”. It is accurate to the point of nicking the head off a pin up to about fourteen hundred yards.’

These three fellows, one of them the uncle of the missing child, had discovered nothing. They turned back with me, however, without being asked. I could have excused them very gladly. After what Tom Merritt had told me, I should have preferred being left alone to deal with the situation unaided. There was no avoiding it, however. I suggested splitting up the party and had the satisfaction of seeing this suggestion put into effect. The three of them walked off slowly to the left while I waited, standing inside the cemetery gate, until I could just hear their voices.

Then I took up my stand with my back against the inside of the cemetery wall, directly opposite the big Merritt family mausoleum.

The strong moonlight made it stand out clearly. I leaned against the stone wall, my rifle cuddled in my arms, and waited. I made no attempt to watch the mausoleum continuously, but ranged with my eyes over the major portion of the cemetery, an area which, being only slightly shrubbed, and sloping upward gently from the entrance, was plainly visible. From time to time as I stood there, ready, I would catch a faint snatch of the continuous conversation going on among the three searchers, as they walked along on a long course which I had suggested to them, all the way around the cemetery, designed to cover territory which, in the local phraseology, ran ‘down through’, ‘up across’, and ‘over around’. I had been waiting, and the three searchers had been meandering, for perhaps twenty minutes – the ancient town clock in the Congregational church tower had boomed ten about five minutes before – when I heard a soft, grating sound in the direction of the Merritt mausoleum. My eyes came back to it sharply.

There, directly before the now half-open bronze door, stood a strange, even a grotesque, figure. It was short, squat, thick-set. Upon it, I might say accurately, hung – as though pulled on in the most hurried and slack fashion imaginable – a coat and trousers. The moonlight showed it up clearly and it was plain, even in such a light, that these two were the only garments in use. The trousers hung slackly, bagging thickly over a pair of large bare feet. The coat, unbuttoned, sagged and slithered lopsidedly. The coat and trousers were the standardized, unmistakable, diagonal gray material of a chauffeur’s livery. The head was bare and on it a heavy, bristle-like crop of unkempt hair stood out absurdly. The face was covered with an equally bristle-like growth, unshaven for a month by the appearance. About the tight-shut, menacing mouth which divided a pair of square, iron-like broad jaws, the facial hairs were merged or blended in what seemed from my viewpoint a kind of vague smear, as though the hair were there heavily matted.

From this sinister figure there then emerged a thick, guttural, repressed voice, as though the speaker were trying to express himself in words without opening his lips.

‘Come – come he-ar. Come – I will show you what you look for.’

Through my head went everything that Tom Merritt had whispered in my ear. This was my test – my test, with a very great deal at stake – of my trust in what he had said – in him – in the rightness of his information; and it had been information, based on his deduction, such as few men have had to decide upon. I said a brief prayer in that space of a few instants. I observed that the figure was slowly approaching me.

‘Come,’
it repeated
– ‘come now – I show you – what you, a-seek – here.’

I pulled myself together. I placed my confidence, and my future, in Tom Merritt’s hands.

I raised my Männlicher, took careful aim, pulled the trigger. I repeated the shot. Two sharp cracks rang out on that still summer air, and then I lowered the deadly little weapon and watched while the figure crumpled and sagged down, two little holes one beside the other in its forehead, from which a dark stain was spreading over the bristly face, matting it all together the way the region of the mouth had looked even before it lay quiet and crumpled up on the ground half-way between the mausoleum and where I stood.